Kubernetes 1.37 Is on EKS: DRA Device Taints, Metrics API GA, Pod-Level Resources, and Who Should Upgrade First

Kubernetes 1.37 became available on Amazon EKS on October 1, 2026, introducing stable Dynamic Resource Allocation device taints and tolerations, which allow operators to isolate a failed accelerator such as one GPU without draining an entire node, and graduating the metrics.k8s.io/v1 API without changing its fields from v1beta1. Clusters must continue serving v1beta1 because the Horizontal Pod Autoscaler still depends on it, while custom and external metrics APIs used by tools such as Prometheus Adapter and KEDA remain beta and warrant compatibility testing. Pod-level CPU, memory, and hugepage resource budgets remain a beta feature enabled by default since EKS 1.34, offering potential efficiency gains for sidecar-heavy Linux workloads but requiring staged validation with quotas, limits, and autoscaling tools. The recommended upgrade sequence is non-production clusters, stateless production workloads, GPU clusters using compatible DRA drivers, and finally clusters with KEDA, older operators, or sensitive StatefulSets, although clusters on EKS 1.34 or older should upgrade before standard support ends to avoid the substantially higher extended-support charge. Pre-upgrade checks should include deprecated APIs, add-on and Karpenter versions, webhooks, CRDs, disruption budgets, SELinux shared-volume behavior, and node-version skew; EKS permits a one-minor-version control-plane rollback within seven days, but add-ons and nodes require separate recovery planning.

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